A creature that does not exist spends these lines being stunned, lost and finally victorious. The lizard-cat, half reptile and half mammal, is struck by noon sunlight, drifts through memory and sorrow while autumn burns around it, falls into a darkness where time itself seems to break, and then returns to noon on different terms. The central idea is that the thing which overwhelms you can become the thing you live on. Light begins as an assault and ends as breath. Even the title hints at this. "Licks" is a small, almost domestic verb, and it makes light something to be tasted rather than endured.
The first stanza is the most orderly, which suits a description of disorientation. Its rhymes run *daze, blaze, plays* on one side and *fall, gall* on the other, so the sound keeps closing around the creature like a ring of heat. "Noon suns stun the lizard-cat at mid-day's daze" is packed so tightly with echoing sounds that the line itself feels sunstruck. Double meanings do quiet work here. "The autumnal leaves call the fall" announces a season and names a decline at once. "Gall" means bitterness but also nerve, so the sorrow carries a hint of defiance from the start. Then comes the invented word "dazzilance," which sounds like *dazzle* crossed with *radiance*. It describes sorrow that glitters, pain that is somehow bright. The vermillion foliage and the named place, Berkshire, give this daze a physical setting, though the poem never explains why the creature is grieving.
In the second stanza the lines shrink and the world falls apart. "Time's spectrum breaks down / into blues and blacks" imagines a prism failing, with the full range of colour reduced to the shades of a bruise. The creature is now all mouth and claw, caught in "mad-jawing and clawing around the dark," and the harsh, clattering sounds make the struggle audible. The turn comes with a military phrase: "native fifth column of light." A fifth column is a hidden force working inside enemy territory. By calling the light "native," the poem suggests it was never only an outside invader. It was already inside the creature, in its "thick blood-floods," waiting to rise. The couplet *light / night* is the first clean rhyme since the opening stanza, and it clicks shut like a lock opening.
The last stanza begins "again it is high noon," the same hour as the first line, but everything has flipped. The creature, once stunned, is now "not bored" by the "glare-glint brand of granite sun." The hard consonants turn the sun into stone, yet the creature takes it in through "the pores between its scales," which "breathe / the fire-light." The hybrid animal makes sense here. Lizards and cats are both creatures whose idea of comfort is a hot surface, and the poem fuses them into one supreme sun-lover. Then comes the paradox "solidified incandescence," fire made solid. This echoes the granite and gives the creature something to stand on. The military language returns in "makes its stand / at the pinnacle of radiance," and the creature no longer hides inside the dark like a secret force. It holds the high ground in the open.
Form and meaning move together. The rhyme that tightens around the first stanza loosens into free verse by the last, and the only sound that carries over is the suffix *-ance*. "Dazzilance," the coined word for bright sorrow, is answered by "incandescence" and "radiance." The same glow is still there, but the creature has stopped being dazzled by it and become part of it.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it never says what the lizard-cat stands for. Nothing in the text ties it to a particular event, so it can be read as grief, endurance, or anyone who has been blinded by something and learned to look straight at it. The poem trusts its invented words, its hybrid animal and its changing sounds to carry the feeling, and it gives the reader a rare picture of recovery with no comfort in it, only heat, hardness and a creature that stays upright in the glare.